Dire .. que l'homme est constitué de certains éléments chimiques est une description ne convenant qu'à ceux dont l'intention est de l'utiliser comme engrais.

What a mistake that had been, to create a construct [AI] that could suffer. He knew that now. Life, pain, death, they were no playthings. Biology was serious business, not for amateurs and foolish gods.

For in disease the most voluntary or most special movements, faculties, etc., suffer first and most, that is in an order the exact opposite of evolution. Therefore I call this the principle of Dissolution.

Man is a product of nature, a part of the Universe. The Universe is operated under exact natural laws. Man is a product of millions of years of evolution. He adapts himself to the laws of nature or he perishes.

A god who is capable of sending intelligible signals to millions of people simultaneously, and of receiving messages from all of them simultaneously, cannot be, whatever else he might be, simple. Such Bandwidth!

[When asked by a student if he believes in any gods]Oh, no. Absolutely not... The biggest advantage to believing in God is you don't have to understand anything, no physics, no biology. I wanted to understand.

Permanence of instinct must go with permanence of form...The history of the present must teach us the history of the past.[Referring to studying fossil remains of the weevil, largely unchanged to the present day.]

La fécondité absurde de la femme l'empêchait de participer activement à l'accroissement de ces ressources tandis qu'elle créait indéfiniment de nouveaux besoins.

Amidst the vicissitudes of the earth's surface, species cannot be immortal, but must perish, one after another, like the individuals which compose them. There is no possibility of escaping from this conclusion.

It is my belief that the basic knowledge that we're providing to the world will have a profound impact on the human condition and the treatments for disease and our view of our place on the biological continuum.

The idea that one can go to the fossil record and expect to empirically recover an ancestor-descendant sequence, be it of species, genera, families, or whatever, has been, and continues to be, a pernicious illusion.

That natural selection can produce changes within a type is disputed by no one, not even the staunchest creationist. But that it can transform one species into another — that, in fact, has never been observed.

If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find no such case.

A grand and almost untrodden field of inquiry will be opened, on the causes and laws of variation, on correlation of growth, on the effects of use and disuse, on the direct actions of external conditions, and so forth.

The myosin in our own skeletal muscles is more closely related to the myosin driving the flight muscles of that irritating housefly buzzing around your head than it is to the myosin in the muscles of your own sphincters